Helmuth von Pannwitz

Helmuth von Pannwitz (14 October 1898-16 January 1947) was a Generalleutnant of the German Wehrmacht and the Ataman of the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps during World War II.

Biography
Helmuth von Pannwitz was born on 14 October 1898 in Botzanowitz, Silesia, German Empire (present-day Bodzanowice, Poland) to a family of Prussian nobles, and he volunteered in the Imperial German Army during World War I. Immediately after the war, he joined the Freikorps and put down Polish separatist uprisings in Silesia, although he was forced to flee to Poland for two attacks against the government of the Weimar Republic. In 1931, he returned to Germany after he was granted amnesty, and he rejoined the Wehrmacht armed forces in 1935 as a captain of the German cavalry.

When World War II broke out in 1939, he commanded a reconnaissance detachment during the invasion of Poland and the battle of France. In 1942, he was promoted to Oberst, and he was given command of the XV SS Cossack Cavalry Corps after overseeing its formation on 21 April 1943. The unit fought against Soviet partisans in Ukraine and Belarus before fighting against the Yugoslav Partisans in Yugoslavia, and he made it clear that any crime against Nazi Germany would carry the death penalty. His forces were therefore responsible for many massacres and executions, although he disagreed with Adolf Hitler's decree that Slavs were sub-human, saying that the policies were unhuman and wrong. Pannwitz was loved by the cossacks who served under him, as he attended Orthodox Christian ceremonies with them and was regarded as a cossack himself; they named him "Supreme Ataman", a title last used by Czar Nicholas II of Russia. In February 1945, his cossacks were forced into the Waffen-SS, and Pannwitz refused to join the SS. He was captured by the Soviet Red Army at Judenburg, Austria, and he was imprisoned by the USSR alongside all of the captured cossacks. On 16 January 1947, he was executed for war crimes in Moscow, Russian SFSR, and he would be rehabilitated in 1996.